by Andrea Bartz
In my mind, the little figures on the patio milled around: Booze was everywhere, splashing into cups with pours of Sprite or Diet Coke. Coke, real coke, from Jinny’s backpack, little lines Mikki expertly arranged on the patio table. Tabs of Molly, of course, and some ketamine, though I was too scared to touch it. Jinny had had a little of everything, and she was rolling, seemed genuinely happy to be there with us.
We were playing music from somebody’s phone, dancing next to the swimming pool. I could feel it all: the dizzying hum of the season’s first cicadas, wafts of lilac eddying around, a few fireflies strobing in the lawn. Mikki cueing “Empire State of Mind” on her iPhone and clapping in delight as Eleanor stood to shout-sing along: “Let’s hear it for Neeew Yooork … ”
Someone had had the great idea of going for a swim. And Eleanor said it was fine, as long as we left everything how we found it. So we’d peeled the pool cover back halfway, folded it on itself, then stripped to our underwear and jumped in. Diving and doing handstands and dunking each other, so full of life and liquor. Jinny’s eyeliner bled down her cheeks. I had the dizzy notion we were all best friends that night, Jinny was one of us, although we only saw her every few months, although she knew much more about our lives than we did hers.
I watched as the imaginary Hana below me had another idea, the decision that would change the course of our lives. Pizza. I’d wanted frozen pizza, volunteered to make it, climbed out of the pool shrieking about the cold. I’d closed the patio doors behind me and stumbled to the basement, holding on to shelves and things to keep from falling as I made my way to the chest freezer in the back. And I’d found a box, pepperonis and sausages and tiny squares of red and green peppers glistening on the front, and hugged it to my chest idiotically before beginning the climb back upstairs.
The lights in the kitchen had been on, and using up my full, drunken concentration I’d found a pan, sliced at the pizza’s plastic covering—careful, careful with the knife, I told myself. The other three were still outside, music blasting. I managed to get the pizza onto the cookie sheet and slide it into the oven without burning myself, and I’d celebrated that small victory for a moment before realizing I hadn’t turned it on.
I was still fumbling around the kitchen when someone banged against the glass door, and I screamed and dropped the Coke and rum I’d been clutching. Then Mikki threw open the sliding door and stepped inside, tripping over the base.
The next part was hazy, the timeline unclear.
“Jinny fell,” Eleanor cried, slurring and sobbing as she stumbled inside. They were dripping everywhere, trembling from the wetness and the terror. Jinny had slipped and hit her head on her way into the pool, they said again, and they’d tried to get her out but she’d gotten herself tangled in the pool cover, fighting them off as they tried to yank her out. And then she’d gone limp. By the time they’d pulled her onto the cold cement, she was already gone, already cold, already dead.
If I’d been out there … well, we’d never know. But it was easy to imagine things would have turned out differently. I’d have noticed her more quickly, coordinated our rescue effort. I’d have run inside and dialed 911. But even then, standing just inside the sliding doors, drunk and damp and high, I’d done nothing.
I’ve thought about it a lot since then. Perhaps I didn’t protest because my inebriated mind was performing some unspoken calculations. Four drunk women, three of them white. The cops who’d come knocking if we dialed those three numbers.
All at once, as I stood in front of the second-story window, sparkly static whooshed in front of my eyes, and my hands and feet screamed out with fizzy tingling. Holding on to the wall for support, I shuffled back into Eleanor’s room, closed the door, and sank to the floor.
My eyes fell on her grade-school yearbook, still leaning out from the shelf. It snapped into place, like popping a single bit of bubble wrap. Eleanor’s Gleam On article, the one we’d worked so hard on together, me pushing for more details until it was just right: The Herd’s origin story, how she’d hated this junior-high-only Adventure Camp, ropes courses under the male gaze, the long yarn from that to New York’s premier all-female coworking space and community. But if she hadn’t gone to middle school … ?
Would Mikki know what to make of this? It was probably nothing, some simple explanation; Eleanor had gone to camp in grade school, maybe, and she’d moved the story up by a few years to make it more relatable, fudged the dates. I wandered the house, peering in on seating areas scattered every which way. Again, it struck me how cavernous this mansion seemed, how easy it was to lose a person, tangled in the neon-blue tarp stretched like skin over the pool outside. Mikki was nowhere to be found and this just compounded my confusion, a general sense of disorientation, of reality crumbling off in tiny flakes.
I almost walked directly into Karen, who was coming out of the basement, carrying wine.
“I—I wanted to see if you needed help with dinner or anything.”
She looked alarmed. “It’s not even five yet,” she replied.
“Oh. I … I fell asleep.”
She inched toward the kitchen. “Well, speaking of five o’clock, I was just going to open this nice Merlot blend. Can I get you some?”
She chattered nervously as she battled with a corkscrew, and I took in the scene: two empty bottles lined up by the sink, a lipstick-stained glass she’d pulled over next to her. While we visitors had retreated to our quarters, Karen had been drinking. Before today, even at fancy restaurants, I’d never seen her finish a glass.
She carried over two hearty pours and I clinked hers before taking a sip. Her small-talk soliloquy made me nervous; normally Gary was the talker. Finally she ran out of steam and fell silent.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked. “About Eleanor, I mean.” I looked down at the wine, gave it a little spin.
“Of course.”
“She skipped seventh and eighth grade, right?”
“That’s right, yeah. The school psychologist thought she’d be fine jumping three years ahead, but we thought that was a bit much.”
“Right.” I took another sip. “But she seemed okay with two?”
“Oh, she thrived.” Her voice cracked. “She seemed so relieved to be challenged, to not be sitting in class bored out of her skull. That boredom was much harder for her, being so far ahead of the other students. She’d grasp a concept in two seconds and then the class would spend two weeks on it.”
“For sure. That must’ve been awful.” I tapped a nail against the glass, listened to the chime. “How did you know it was bothering her? Was she acting out, or …”
“It wasn’t good for anybody. She was always … almost too smart for her own good, I’d say.” She grimaced. “Certainly smarter than the rest of us here, that much was clear.”
There was discomfort in this, pain in the jokey self-deprecation. Sober, she might have been able to cover it up, but I saw it in the way she recovered, curled herself over her glass.
“This is gonna sound random, but did she ever go to an adventure camp? Like in the summer, before the school year?”
She swallowed and looked up; her eyes made it clear she had no idea what I was talking about. “A what camp? Adventure? That sounds like Eleanor’s nightmare.”
“Okay. So she didn’t …” I wrapped my fingers around the glass’s spine. “It’s just weird, because when she announced she was starting the Herd, she wrote this essay. And … maybe she was just remembering it wrong, or conflating it with something else, but …”
I saw Karen’s eyes, white and round as two sand dollars, and stopped. It was that Oh crap look, equal parts bewildered and defensive.
“I’m getting all mixed up,” she announced, touching her temple. “I haven’t been eating much and then I just went ahead and opened this wine because it’s what we do when Eleanor’s here for the holidays, and usually Gary or someone will say, ‘Hey, it’s five o’clock somewhere!’ and so I just … I thought …” Abruptly she pu
shed both palms onto her face and I watched in alarm as her shoulders shook, her crying somehow both huge and tiny. After a moment I scraped back my chair and put my hand on her back, rubbing gingerly, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Do you want me to find Gary?”
She shook her head, her hands moving with her face.
“Do you want … should I help you upstairs, do you want to lie down?” This she ignored, too, and I thought suddenly of my mom, what she’d definitely want in that moment: “Would you like to be left alone?”
A little sobbing noise slipped through her fingers and she nodded. I thought about attempting a hug and instead gave her shoulder a final pat, then headed back upstairs, dread building in my lungs with every step.
I’d seen Karen cry like that exactly once before. When I woke up in Eleanor’s bed almost a decade ago, I’d been so hungover my skin hurt, my eyeballs, my bone marrow, every cubic inch of me. I’d lain still while my sludgy brain tried to figure out how much of the night before was a nightmare, a bad dream.
None of it, it turned out. It was all real, too real. In the late hours of May 7, while Jinny’s body leaked blood onto the patio, we rising stars had listened to Eleanor, cocaine coursing through our veins, alcohol gnawing away at our brain cells. We faced her, crying as she decided we couldn’t handle this now, her parents would know what to do, we should move the body inside and then deal with it in the morning, when we were clearer, when her parents could help.
I’d watched, trying not to scream, as Eleanor and Mikki carried Jinny inside and laid her on her back. We’d turned off the lights and huddled together on Eleanor’s bed, afraid to be alone. As we shivered in the dark, Eleanor told us again why this was for the best—graduation was around the corner, we had illegal substances in our systems, it would be clear we were breaking the law, our futures could be ruined. Plus we’d already moved the body, and there was no guarantee anyone would believe that it was an accident.
Then Mikki had begun to freak out, her chest heaving, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” And Eleanor had run her fingers through Mikki’s hair and said we would get it all straightened out in the morning.
We’d woken to the sound of Karen’s screams. They’d gotten Eleanor’s voicemails, begging them to hurry home, but we’d slept through their calls back. Eleanor had explained everything, all three of us sobbing with high-pitched coyote sounds, and Karen had cried silently, shoulders shaking, just like she had a minute ago.
Gary asked about Jinny’s age, several times, confirmed that she was older than us. Nailed down exactly who this woman was, what we knew about her, who might come looking. It later dawned on me that he was doing the math: a stranger, a homeless, vagrant drug dealer, careful not to set down roots nor leave a trace. Now, it occurred to me that he’d be found responsible alongside us, since there’d been a minor—Eleanor, secretly twenty—drinking in his home.
He’d looked each of us in the eyes, speaking kindly, carefully: “And you’re positive you didn’t tell anyone about this trip. That no one knows you’re here.” We’d all nodded, sniffling like toddlers.
“Then you drive back now. You say you never left campus, had a quiet night in. Work on your story on the drive home, get it straight, repeat it until you can say what happened down to the tiniest detail. From this moment on we never, ever mention that girl again.”
I reached for the old-fashioned knob on Eleanor’s door and locked myself inside. It was dark, abruptly, like a riptide had yanked down the sun. So Eleanor had lied—convincingly, to my face—about the Herd’s origin story. But why? Had something else happened around that time that made her long for a no-boys-allowed club, but she fictionalized it for the Gleam On blog? I tried calling Mikki, listening hard in case I could hear the ring—no luck. Hmm. Karen wasn’t about to tell me, but Cameron or Ted might know something, a secret or story squirreled away from their shared childhood.
I grabbed my purse and headed downstairs. As I turned into the hall, I paused in front of the door to the den. It was closed, Katie shut up on the other side of it. Her words still stung, her defensive flailing, but I felt a sudden, sisterly urge to tell her about the weirdness with Karen and about Eleanor’s odd fake Adventure Camp story. Katie was smart, her brain making pinging, Christmas-light connections I’d never spot on my own, so maybe she’d have some insights. Actually, she’d been researching that damn book—maybe she knew something I didn’t.
I knocked, softly and then three crisp thumps. The old door was closed but not latched, so my last bang sent it swinging inward. I caught the knob in my hand, apologizing as some of the room came into view, and then froze. There was movement, a scramble, and then four eyes stared back at me, wide as raccoons’. The rest of the scene sorted itself out around them: Katie and Ted were on the pull-out couch, her with one end of a sheet pulled up to her heart, Ted with another end strewn over his lap.
The spell broke and with a little shake of my head, I turned away. “Oh my God, I’m sorry, the door wasn’t latched.”
More rustling as they presumably flung clothes on. “Hana, is everything okay? What are you …”
I peered out into the hallway, but mentally I kept hinging back and forth between them: Katie … and Ted. Ted … and Katie. This felt unfathomable, like learning your coworker met your childhood friend while backpacking across Nepal.
“Sorry. I was just—I don’t know where anyone is, and I was gonna walk over to Cameron’s. Just wanted to let you know. Is he …” The awkwardness plumed, filling up the room like smoke. “Ted, is he home, do you know?”
“Uhhh … I think so. Try his cottage first.” His voice ached with embarrassment.
I pulled the door closed, tugging too long in an unsuccessful bid to get it to latch. Then, face burning, I yanked my coat from the hall closet. A hunter-green backpack on the floor caught my eye; it wasn’t mine or Mikki’s, and it hadn’t been here before. Something of Eleanor’s, pulled out by Gary? The top gaped a bit, and I couldn’t help myself—I nosed it open and pulled out the manila folder inside.
My chest froze: The first page was a printout of a Click profile, annotated in small, spiky handwriting. Eleanor. I turned the page: bank statements, Eleanor’s account number printed at the top, all slightly askew like someone had snapped surreptitious photos of the originals. Sprinkled with dots and arrows and question marks. Nausea mushroomed in my belly as I continued flipping through: a copy of a scratched-out Post-it, a meaningless code in what looked to be Eleanor’s handwriting. Then a confusing block of numbers and text, and I had to follow the scribbled annotations for a few pages before I realized this was Eleanor’s browser history, filched from the router.
The router. The knapsack, rugged-looking yet expensive, was obviously Ted’s. Why on earth had he been stalking her? And where had he gotten all this? Had he broken into her home, or—the thought like a flashbulb—Eleanor’s office at the Herd?
I glanced back down the hallway, where Ted and Katie were still closed up in the den. She was safe with him, right? Where the hell was Mikki—where was everybody? I slipped the folder back into the bag, zipped up my coat, and hurried out into the tundra.
CHAPTER 19
Katie
MONDAY, DECEMBER 23, 5:35 P.M.
Hana rattled the doorknob for three excruciating seconds, four, pulling at the door and twisting hard as I squeezed my eyes closed and silently begged her to stop. Finally, she did, and we listened as she moved farther down the hall.
“Sooo … that was awkward,” Ted announced, correctly.
I cupped my hands around the lower half of my face, then glanced at him. “Really? Because that was part of an elaborate ploy to indulge my exhibitionism.” He looked at me with enough alarm that I flopped back on the bed. “I’m kidding. Haven’t you noticed by now that I make stupid jokes when I’m uncomfortable? Because holy hell, am I uncomfortable.”
“You and me and her both.” He zipped his jeans and sat back on the b
ed, springs creaking. “What do you think that was all about? I thought you two weren’t talking.”
“We weren’t. I have no idea.” Already, her intrusion felt removed, like a scene that should’ve been cut from a movie. Everything about today had had a sad, cinematic, dreamy quality to it, come to think of it. The huge mustard-yellow house that looked exactly like I’d pictured it. The thin hallways and rattling windows and multiple fireplaces, all the architectural details I’d walked past on a self-guided tour, running the pads of my fingers over every surface. There wasn’t a speck of dust here, not anywhere.
Earlier today I’d spotted a lineup of photo albums in a seating area near the front door. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I’d pulled one out and opened it, gluey pages sticking as I dragged them across the binder rings. Eleanor in first grade—too far back. I tried another where Eleanor was a little older, skinny and shiny-haired with a mouthful of braces. I found the right era, bell-bottomed jeans and neon tube tops, but I never did find the exact shot I’d seen in the Facebook group, the one on the page with the zigzagging blue glue behind it.
Surreal, that was the word for today. An entire lifetime had passed since we’d left Penn Station, and it wasn’t even dinnertime. It was instantly clear our visit was a bad idea; Gary could hardly speak and Karen kept babbling, high-pitched and taut. After poking around in their photo albums, I’d come upon the grieving couple drinking wine in the kitchen and felt an instant urge to apologize—here I was, a stranger wandering their home as they tried to mourn their freshly killed daughter. Gary looked up and his expression told me he was thinking the same thing—what the hell was I doing there?—but Karen had waved me over and fetched a glass for me.
They’d asked me questions, politely pushing over follow-up after follow-up like a long line of dominoes. I told them about my freelance work, living in Michigan for a year, attempting to join the Herd. They asked about my book project, about the fake-news factory in Iron River, and my chest seized up as I mumbled something about still nailing down a new angle since the research hadn’t gone as planned. I was cagey but they barely seemed to notice, each wrapped in their own cocoon of grief.